Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

GAMING NEWS

Spencer On Xbox One/PC Cross-Play: "I'm Not Allowed To Leak Things"

Thanks to the rising success of Steam, Microsoft has lost whatever small grip it once had on the PC gaming market. Will the company attempt to change things by expanding the Xbox platform in a big way following the release of Xbox One? Maybe.

In an interview with AusGamers, Microsoft's Phil Spencer spoke to the potential of Xbox One/PC cross-play, and while he didn't confirm anything, he certainly didn't rule it out either. When asked about whether or not gamers might see Windows 8 take advantage the Xbox platform in this way, Spencer replied:

I’m not allowed to leak things [smiles]. But I think what you’re talking about makes a lot of sense. Now you have differences in Windows gaming and console gaming around control and input… in fact if you go back to Shadow Runon Xbox 360 — something I worked on — we had PC players playing against Xbox 360 customers. We didn’t have tremendous success with that, but we learnt a lot from it.

And then earlier this year we released Skulls of the Shogun, which was a game we launched on all three platforms on the same day, and you could start on one platform and then save the game to the Cloud and play across any of the screens and progress. And then Halo: Spartan Assaulthas some links between Halo 4 and Spartan Assault, even though they’re very different games.

This connected ecosystem across all the different devices is definitely where I think the future of gaming is going; you don’t have to do it as a developer, but you have the capability and I think a system like Xbox Live across all those screens where you know who someone is and who their friends are, what their Achievements are and their progression is really critical to that.

This follows reports that Microsoft has managed to get Halo 4 up and running on PC and Windows Phone thanks to the power of the cloud. Could we be seeing a merging of Windows ecosystems? Is that something you even want? Sound off in the comments below and let us know.